Margot is a blue merle, split face, standard Australian shepherd who came to live with us in December 2019. Margot was born on October 11th, 2019 in Los Angeles. She was the runt of the litter and among the smallest of her siblings. Timid and shy, she was just a wiggling little gray thing when she came to us.
We were originally looking to adopt a mature dog but ran into problems like ‘high prey drive.’ The first priority is birdie safety and we didn’t want to pursue getting a dog if there were any risks to the birds. We figured it’ll be easier to train a puppy to keep a distance from the birds than to train an adult dog and suppress their drive to put teeth on the birds. So, along came puppy Margot.
Margot was everything we were looking for. She’s definitely not the alpha dog, is smaller than the average standard Aussie, has snow leopard patterned coat (this is for vanity), is super sweet, and like Chewie, learned to follow house rules really well.
I think a lot of people seek the alpha dog character in their dogs. It’s great to have a pack leader and a dog that could be protective, but in our case, we really needed a puppy that would understand how to follow the established rules around birds. After seeing Margot’s interactions with her siblings, it was very easy to tell that she wasn’t the bossy type. I couldn’t afford a situation where Margot thought she was the one calling the shots – that definitely wouldn’t work with the birds.
Up until ~6 months, Margot barely had any interaction with the birds. We had to alternate their times out, so the birds were upstairs when she was downstairs, or birds were caged when she wasn’t crated, Margot went on walks when birds came out of cage, etc. We tried to avoid any toys that were in a bird shape, or too similar to the birb colors. We wanted to eliminate any confusion on Margot’s end and teach her that the birds are family and not a toy. Margot is also trained to be off the furniture and the birds are discouraged to go on the floor. Creating such barriers and rules minimizes the animals crossing paths.
So far, Margot has proven to be a great doggo. She is afraid of the Chewie and sits at a distance from Dante and Baby. You can sometimes see her walking around in the background. If you’d like, you can check out her Instagram here.
x Birdmom